Ish Klein, _Moving Day_

IF YOU ARE one of those folks who think that all contemporary American poetry sounds alike, (1) I believe you are mistaken and (2) you should read Ish Klein.

This collection from 2011 would be a place to start. Sometimes Klein is surreal, sometimes plainspoken, and the surprising thing is she often is both at once. She comes out with quite atartling  statements that, even as they startle, seem to be matter-of-fact documentary reports. "Standard penises are made of a certain kind of plant," she notes in "No Promissory Notes," a poem that seems like an encyclopedia article from a world similar to but not identical to our own.

The poems often recount first-person tales, and these too seem to take place in a world with a physics a little different from those of the familiar world, in which one mighty be, for instance, an ice cube:

The walls are thick! It's cold!
I am a trayed square among others like ice!
We are getting smaller; it's a good sign. 

And it makes more space. My acquaintances and I
Work on melting each other. It can be done in the shower!
I am not ashamed, how possible with such poor lighting?

The marvelous thing, though, is that Klein's voice inspires perefct confidence. That is, even though I do not know how getting smaller could be a good sign, nor how one could melt an acquaintance in the shower, I am happy to accept both assertions simply on Klein's say-so. (That better lighting might increase the risk of shame I do understand, I have to say.)

Klein also has increased the total of good poems about Hamlet (a category in which I include Boris Pasternak's "Hamlet" and Erik Campbell's "Hamlet: The Action Figure Series." It ends with Ophelia, here called  Orphée (the French name for Orpheus), which makes a certain amount of sense, as she may well be trying to restore someone from the land of the dead, much as Hamlet himself is. I tend to think catastrophe might have been averted had Hamlet been able to maintain his bond with Ophelia--Horatio is a good ally, but (obviously) not enough all by himself. Perhaps Hamlet and Ophelia could have rescued each other from obsession with the deaths of their fathers?

You remember poor Orphée?
A truly good audience. 

Asleep in the reeds and mixed-up theatrically,
she thinks she is the river
and will likely enter its vaguely compelling commotion.
That is, unless 

you, Mr. Hamlet, want to catch her
before she jumps in (she can't swim),
leaving you to th emachinations
and actually alone. 

It's the Hamlet poem Stevie Smith never got around to writing.